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Structural Integrity and People, Too

The elevated railway over the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, with its Rem Koolhaas-designed encircling tube.Credit
Iwan Baan

DURING one three-week period recently Iwan Baan touched down in Amsterdam, Mexico City, Miami, New York, Milan, Rome, Tokyo, Medellín and Basel, where he photographed buildings designed by some of the world’s top architects, including Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Toyo Ito. Along with Steven Holl, Thom Mayne and the Japanese firm Sanaa, they have helped turn Mr. Baan, 34, into almost certainly the most peripatetic architectural photographer in the world as well as one of the most widely published.

Just five years after he took up architectural photography, Mr. Baan is “remaking the genre,” said Charles Renfro, a partner in Diller Scofidio & Renfro, for whom he has photographed projects like the High Line and the renovated Lincoln Center. For decades magazine editors, developers and architects themselves favored a static style of photography that framed buildings as pristine objects. Mr. Baan’s work, while still showing architecture in flattering lights and from carefully chosen angles, does away with the old feeling of chilly perfection. In its place he offers untidiness, of the kind that comes from real people moving though buildings and real cities massing around them.

Mr. Baan sees buildings as backdrops for his photographs of people, he said during a recent visit to New York. Looking at a picture of the new Cooper Union building in the East Village, designed by Mr. Mayne, Mr. Baan said, “It’s about the woman shuffling down the street.” His work owes as much to Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson as to Julius Shulman or Ezra Stoller, the pre-eminent architectural photographers of the late 20th century.

And where Shulman may be best known for exalting glass houses that hovered above Los Angeles, Mr. Baan often does the opposite, chartering helicopters to photograph buildings as small objects amid relentless urban sprawl. If Shulman and Stoller’s glorifying of pure form was an ideal match for the purist Modern architecture of their era, Mr. Baan’s conjuring of real life may be ideally suited to a time when architects like Mr. Koolhaas are creating buildings meant to absorb and reflect the messiness of 21st-century cities.

Mr. Baan, who grew up outside Amsterdam, got his first camera, an Agfa Clack, at 12 but quickly traded it in for a more sophisticated model. In the mid-1990s he studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art, in The Hague, but he didn’t plan to shoot architecture because when he tried it, he was asked for “incredibly boring” pictures, he said, “with blue sky and no people.” And he never finished school, in part, he said, because some of his professors didn’t consider his digital work “real photography.” At the end of the decade he lived in New York, where he took photos for a series of children’s books.

Photo

Iwan Baan

Like many technophiles of his generation, he was fascinated by the Internet. In 2004 he saw an exhibition of images produced by Mr. Koolhaas’s research studio, AMO, on the history of Europe, and — looking for work — he wrote a proposal for turning it into an interactive Web site. Months after he submitted it, he got a call asking if he could accompany Mr. Koolhaas to Brussels to present the idea to an official of the European Union.

That trip led to a number of collaborations with Mr. Koolhaas, including an assignment to document construction of the CCTV tower in Beijing, which involved flying to Beijing every eight weeks. He contacted the offices of Herzog & de Meuron (whose Bird’s Nest stadium was being built for the 2008 Olympics) and Steven Holl (whose Linked Hybrid, a series of residential towers connected by sky bridges, was breaking ground), asking if he could photograph their buildings there. Rather than waiting to be chosen by clients, “he chose our architecture,” Mr. Holl recalled.

Mr. Baan said he was drawn to the Chinese projects largely because the migrant construction workers who lived on site — as many as 10,000 in the case of CCTV — created entire communities for him to photograph, with the new buildings as backdrops. And he was able to capture pretty much what he saw. Nobody bothered to pose for the young man with a self-effacing manner and a hand-held Canon.

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Unmarried and unattached, Mr. Baan books his own travel, negotiates his own fees by e-mail (it helps that he speaks three languages) and carries all the equipment he needs in a shoulder bag. He works for architects, their clients or magazines, including several European publications. Last year the Italian design magazine Abitare sent Mr. Baan to Norway to photograph the Knut Hamsun Center, a museum by Mr. Holl north of the Arctic Circle. Mr. Holl then purchased the rights to the photographs, which were distributed to news outlets. Given the building’s remote location, Mr. Baan’s photographs will be crucial to how it is received internationally, Mr. Holl said.

In his spare time Mr. Baan is photographing a series of little-known Richard Neutra houses in Europe for a coming show at the MARTa Herford museum in Herford, Germany. And he has flown to Africa repeatedly to photograph the work of contemporary African architects, a personal passion. He had two books out last year, one on the work of Sanaa, the Japanese firm known in New York for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the other on the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. He accepted the Porsche commission, he said, knowing that he would take an approach to the building at odds with the smooth, luxurious image of the cars.

Mr. Baan maintains a studio in Amsterdam — his nominal hometown — where he has developed techniques for taking panoramic photographs of the insides of architectural models. As part of the symbiosis between Mr. Baan and the architects he works with, his panoramas of their models, presented to prospective clients, have helped them win commissions. In addition to working for stars like Mr. Koolhaas he is also helping to popularize the work of young architects whose work he admires, including Sou Fujimoto, who has created some highly innovative houses in remote parts of Japan.

Mr. Baan may never put down roots, but he and a friend, the Dutch-born architect Florian Idenburg, are considering building a two-family house in Brooklyn. (Mr. Idenburg has a wife and children.) That will give Mr. Baan a place to stay and yet another building, in another throbbing city, to use as a backdrop for his startling photos.

A version of this article appears in print on January 24, 2010, on Page AR22 of the New York edition with the headline: Structural Integrity And People, Too. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe